Sun, Dec 15, 2013

If Chinese President Xi Jinping has been intent on bolstering his credentials as a reformer since ascending to the top of the Communist hierarchy in Beijing just over a year ago, his government’s vigorous pursuit of Zhou Yongkang, a retired senior party official, represents the most significant investment yet in what is becoming an anti-corruption crusade, one that will upset the establishment even as it could endear the president to a growing urban middle class.

Zhou was domestic security chief and a member of the Politburo’s Standing Committee, and thus the type of figure most Chinese are unaccustomed to seeing in the hot seat; indeed, an unwritten rule in party politics is that members of the Standing Committee are protected from prosecution once they retire. But Zhou opposed the prosecution of Bo Xilai, the jailed party powerbroker whose criminal saga captured the public imagination and whose harsh sentence established early on that Xi meant business. The new president vowed to go after entrenched elites (“tigers”) as well as mere “flies” in provincial figureheads abusing their power. Zhou falls decidedly in the former category, and now is under house arrest, squarely in the new regime’s crosshairs. And it only makes sense that the president would keep up his anti-graft purge, which might irk some in the vast Communist apparatus but offers the potential of legitimizing him as being unlike decades of previous leaders who failed to move the needle on everything from a harsh one-child policy to environmental devastation that has made industrial smog a fact of urban life. (It’s also very much in line with the other efforts at power centralization we’ve seen from his administration.)

Of course, a handful of high-profile prosecutions does not a change agent make. What might really set Xi apart from his predecessors is a relaxation of Internet censorship or some other effort to establish that in the 21st century, the planet’s most populous country is no longer among its least free. Truth be told, it’s relatively easy to manipulate internal party power dynamics but quite a bit harder to win the active allegiance of over a billion people, many mired in extraordinary poverty. Xi is determined to go a new way, and now the only question is whether the broader Chinese public will follow. Or are his reform tricks just that — smoke and mirrors easily detected by the (increasingly politically sophisticated and highly-educated) population at large? Xi will be in quite a bit of trouble if such a concerted reform drive fails to improve his domestic image; in that case, he would still have hundreds of millions of displeased constituents to impress as he seeks to carve out a more muscular role in the region, but would be left to rely on increasingly alienated (and fearful) foot soldiers of Chinese officialdom.